For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week:

Roundup: Hard Disk Drive Shortages & Pricing - Severe flooding in Thailand has led to more than 500 deaths and extensive property damage. In addition to the human toll, the flooding has had a devastating impact on the Thai economy, including some of the world’s leading production facilities for hard disk drives. Here’s a roundup of the notable media coverage of the impact of these production halts on the availability and pricing of hard disk drives.

Rackspace Launches OpenStack Private Cloud - Rackspace Hosting continues to lease data center space, even as it extends its business beyond its own facilities, as seen in this week’s announcement of its Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition. The new private cloud is powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform organized by Rackspace. The new offering provides Rackspace with an opportunity to build revenues atop private clouds living in customers’ on-premises data centers or third-party colocation centers.

Digital Realty to Adapt Open Compute Designs - Data center developer Digital Realty Trust is adapting its multi-tenant data center designs to give customers the option of implementing elements of the Open Compute designs. The company will continue to use standard power for new buildings, but will also develop an optional layout incorporating the power architecture used in Open Compute.

Amazon Turns on its New Cloud in Oregon - Amazon Web Services announced today that it is now serving its data from servers in Oregon, where the company has been building several data centers. The new data center capacity has allowed Amazon to create a second availability zone in the US-West region, offering additional options for users to house and serve data across several geographic areas to improve redundancy and reliability.

Best Buy Acquires Cloud Provider mindSHIFT - The Geek Squad has a new question: Want some cloud storage with that virus cleanup? Electronics retailer Best Buy has reached an agreement to acquire managed services provider mindSHIFT Technologies for $167 million, the company said today. Best Buy says the deal will help extend its growth in the small and mid-sized business IT services, which is a focus of mindSHIFT’s business.